F.E.A.R.

Share.

Disturbing, strange, violent... and rather awesome.

By Tom McNamara

When I was growing up, horror came in the form of gory slasher movies and incredibly long Stephen King novels. Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Castle Rock ruled the roost. While King's stuff was sometimes really good, Hollywood didn't seem interested in anything more than upping the ante on gruesome special effects. In recent years, a movement has come over from Japan, as The Ring landed with a bang (although Sixth Sense did presage this movement by a couple years). The theme here is creeping out the viewer with unsettling, ambiguous imagery and paranormal phenomena. Recent entries such as The Grudge have shown that there might be only so much inspiration you can draw from this well, but Monolith decided to take the bull by the horns and produce a haunted, inspired world full of malevolent spirits and mysterious plots.

The First Encounter Assault Recon team is a military group that takes an aggressive attitude towards ghosts, and while the reasons never become very clear, it's a fairly good setup for a unique take on first-person shooters. You'll take the role of one of the soldiers, investigating what is at first simply the case of an escaped convict who has some unusual dietary tendencies. From there, the fit quickly hits the shan, and you'll find yourself knee-deep in a tragic, ghostly conspiracy. Sometimes it resembles Resident Evil, other times Fatal Frame. But FEAR stands on its own as a challenging and nuanced experience that I think is one of the best shooters this year.

The first thing you'll notice is how nice it looks. The proprietary engine is the product of years and years of development, and it's got more bells and whistles than a Rose Day Parade. The list of features is as long as my arm, and they're all fairly clearly explained in the options menus. You can tell the game to auto-detect the best settings, then run a brief benchmark to determine how well it's going to play. Or you can tweak dozens of different toggles and sliders to your heart's content. The review rig's auto-detect settings, with 3.0GHz P4, 1GB of RAM, and a GeForce 6800GT OC at 1024x768, had 4xAF (anisotropic filtering, to make textures look nicer), but no AA. (I was able to sneak 2xAA in, but I don't know if the game would perform well across the board with that).

Soft shadows were also off, but almost everything else was cranked to the max, and the benchmark ran at an average of 39 frames per second. For what it's worth, I used my home rig to play the game (which went gold about three weeks ago) at my place of residence, and I tested multiplayer on my game rig at work, which has similar specs but twice as much RAM.

Anyhoo, FEAR looks like it has indeed been optimized since the single-player demo was released. The physics aren't quite as detailed as what Half-Life 2 spoiled us with, but it's otherwise a top-of-the line game in terms of visuals. When re-loading a saved game or starting the game from the desktop, some initial physics quirks appeared sometimes. Bodies would twitch for a few moments, which is a little nerve-wracking with a title like this one. On one occasion, after having loaded the level, an enemy continued to fire his weapon after having fallen, and elsewhere a body kept slamming its arm into a trash can. (Speaking of load times, they were pretty reasonable on all our test rigs.)

On both occasions, however, I was able to silence them with a few bullets from my assault rifle. Random small objects tended to get bounced around a lot when I bumped into them, and switching to a weapon on the ground often made my character slam his current one to the floor. As far as general performance, there was some occasional hitching as various events were triggered. This may or may not be fixed by having a lot of RAM, an SATA hard drive, and/or a faster processor. It was never distracting. In fact, it allowed me to prepare somewhat for the salvo FEAR had in store for me.